Is your dad a dealer? 'Cause you're dope to me.
This post isn't about Bones! (HAVE. YOU. SEEN. THE FINALE PROMO PICTURES. OH GOODNESS. Okay, I'm done.) It's about - books and English majoring, and a meme I took from glassbomb! Slash, do not be surprised by these answers.
1) What author do you own the most books by?
Hemingway. (No surprise there.) It doesn't help that I took a class in college that was almost 50% Hemingway, though.
2) What book do you own the most copies of?
Rather intriguingly, I have four copies of Aeschylus' Oresteia. I bought one originally for a Greek Civ class, then when I took a second Greek history class, I bought it again (forgetting that I had purchased it in the first place). Then for an English paper, I bought a THIRD TRANSLATION so I could compare language in "The Eumenides." Finally, during senior year, I bought this little pocket version with the Greek text on the opposite page so I could keep my Greek skills in shape. (Yeah, not so much.)
For the record, my personal preference is the Lattimore translation. BUT THAT'S JUST OBVIOUS.
3) What fictional character are you secretly in love with?
Lady Brett Ashley from The Sun Also Rises. I know, it's sort of weird.
4) What book have you read more than any other?
It's a tie, between Anna Karenina and A Moveable Feast. I think technically I've opened A Moveable Feast more, because it can be read like a collection of short stories once you're comfortable in it and sometimes I only want some of it, like the parts about Gertrude Stein or even his lessons on how to be a writer. But cover to cover, I've read Anna Karenina four times - which not actually that impressive, except that book is massive.
5) What was your favorite book when you were 10-years-old?
And Then There Were None, or Ten Little Indians, or whatever you want to call it. I was through a serious, serious Agatha Christie phase in my youth. IT PROBABLY EXPLAINS THE LAW & ORDER, come to think of it.
6) What is the worst book you've read in the past year?
I tried desperately to get into Saturday by Ian McEwan, but failed miserably. Even though I understand how it relates to McEwan's canon - in that he keeps writing novels that span smaller and smaller spans of time - I couldn't help but see it as a lame Mrs. Dalloway homage. It made me feel jaded :(
7) What is the best book you've read in the past year?
As I mentioned to glassbomb in her post - Brief & Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao, oh my goodness. I picked it up for vaguely vain reasons - it won the Pulitzer, the author graduated from my college and set the book there, yet I had yet to read it, and therefore felt guilty. But the narrative style hits my sweet spot just so, and the way it's as much about Oscar as the people who lived to bring him to this miserable place he ended up, emotionally (part and parcel of the immigrant experience, I'd imagine) - ugh. LOVE IT. That, and scifi references, and footnotes. What's not to love?
8) If you could tell everyone you know to read one book, what would it be?
I'm going to make the controversial choice and say: Beloved. Sweet Jesus, yes. If only because it always surprises me, the people who end up loving it versus the ones who downright detest it.
9) What is the most difficult book you've ever read?
I'm pretty sure the answer to this question is once and future Ulysses, and since I gave up on it once, I can't answer. So - um. Lord of the Rings? Because it was required reading, all three of them, and I wanted to shoot myself the entire time because I really don't like fantasy as a genre at all? So, um. Yeah?
10) Do you prefer the French or the Russians?
THE FRENCH ARE SO BORING. RUSSIANS ALL THE WAY. Have we ever discussed me whole "damn you, Ronald Reagan, I could have majored in Russian studies and had a job if it wasn't for you" thing? Because it's so true.
11) Shakespeare, Milton or Chaucer?
I have to say Shakespeare, just because Paradise Lost and Canterbury Tales are my only exposure to Milton & Chaucer, whereas I've read... uh, everything but like two plays by Shakespeare? In true English major fashion. And whatever
12) Austen or Eliot?
I would say either, considering that nineteenth century British fiction is generally just not my thing, but I suppose Austen. I had to phsyically coerced by a professor to finish "Mill on the Floss." (Seriously, 19th Century British Fiction was a death of a class for me, which was sad, because the prof was pretty rad unto himself.
13) What is the biggest or most embarrassing gap in your reading?
I... have... never read Nabokov. No, not Lolita. I've never read a drop of Nabokov, period. I KNOW. I KNOW. I KNOW.
14) What is your favorite novel?
True story? Solaris by Stanislaw Lem. I will talk about this novel until I die. If I suddenly trip in the street and fall into a successful career as a writer, I will point to this novel as my raison d'etre. Basically - it's about what happens when you encounter the unknowable, the unquantifiable, the truly New Thing. Lem spends ENTIRE PAGES creating this fake history of the scientific study of this new alien planet, and all it goes to show is that we are limited by our pre-existing knowledge, our gestalts, when we analyze something. THE POINT OF THE ENTIRE NOVEL IS THAT YOU WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO FIND A WORD TO DESCRIBE THE SEA PLANET, BECAUSE IT DOESN'T EXIST. I think that's a really rad thing for a book of words to say. (And, the fact that on top of that you're reading it in translation and therefore not understanding its true it-ness re: nuisances of language? lol to the extreme)
It amuses me greatly that they twice adapted it to movie-form, since if you understand the text, that sort of invalidates the entire point of the story.
(Runner up: The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett. Oh, my god, I had such a Hammett thing in high school. OH MY GOD.)
15) Play?
OKAY. OKAY. Okay.
The easy answer is my thesis topic - anything by Oskar Kokoschka, specifically "Murderer, Hope of Women." I adore that man. He fell in love with Gustav Mahler's widow, and it was epic, and it was tragic, and it fucked him up so bad you wouldn't even believe. We spends whole plays killing her because he's so angry (in which she is always represented a female spirit sucking the spirit of the artist main character; I would like to point out, you know, NOT POINTING FINGERS, but she strung him along for a good long while. As in, um, getting pregnant, telling him to finish a painting before they could get married, and then, uh, having an abortion anyway).
BUT. My real answer is - wait for it - Ghost Sonata by Strindberg. It's just so-- it's fucked up to all extremes. It's almost as if it's this collection of macabre, creepy, wtf scenes - ladies who turn into mummies, cooks who seep the life out of their upper crust employers via soup; the fucked up, uncommunicative family. I LOVE IT. SO MUCH. I'm so weird.
(Yes. Yes. I have a severe thing for European modernism/post-modernism.)
16) Poem?
Unpossible. The whole of the Little Giddings quartets by Eliot, I suppose, with emphasis on the 4th one. What we call the beginning is often the end / And to make an end is to make a beginning. / The end is where we start from. Oh, oh, oh it stirs my heart.
(Runner up: "Valediction Forbidding Mourning" by Donne. There is something so insanely lovely about love described as two souls moving like opposite points of a fixed compass, parted by never separate. PERHAPS THAT'S WHY IT'S MY AIM NAME.)
17) Essay?
This is totally lame and maybe doesn't even count - An Indecent Proposal. WHATEVER. I THINK IT'S HYSTERICAL.
18) Short story?
I am woefully inadequate in this department. Murder in the Rue Morgue, I'd imagine, just because a) again, proto-Law & Order obsession, you make so much SENSE now; b) I can't believe I never saw a single Poe joke the entire time that ape-eats-a-lady's-face thing was going down. (Or maybe I did, and just missed it.)
19) Non-fiction?
In Our Defense: The Bill of Rights in Action, by Caroline Kennedy and some other person I can't remember. Uh, reading this made me realize I wanted to be a lawyer (it's the bill of rights broken down by part, and an on-point legal case that illustrates its strength, weakness, and new interpretations). It's from the early 90s, but still hella good.
(Runner up: THE BIO OF MARIE ANTOINETTE THAT THE SOPHIA COPPOLA MOVIE IS BASED ON. I have no shame.)
20) Graphic novel?
Yeah, I don't do those. Sorry.
21) Memoir?
An Unfinished Woman by Lillian Hellman. See? I TOTALLY HAD A DASHIELL HAMMETT THING GOING ON.
22) History?
*breathes* Probably the Mary Queen of Scots bio I read last year (by Antonia Fraser, of Marie Antoinette fame)? Although this book on Prussia I'm reading right now is FUCKING FASCINATING AS HELL. Partially because sometimes you forget that that Eastern Europe was essentially like a both of Greek city-states well into the industrial age.
23) Mystery or noir?
Like I mentioned above: THE MALTESE FALCON BY DASHIELL MOTHERFUCKING HAMMETT. True story: "Dashiell" is on my baby name list.
24) Science fiction?
Since I already answered Solaris above, I'll go with Le Guin, Left Hand of Darkness.
25) Who is your favorite writer?
I think I have to answer Hemingway. I just love the bastard. I know that's cliche, but who gives a shit.
26) Who is the most overrated writer alive today?
Unfortunately, I can't answer. I have largely apathy for most popular writers - I used to thumb through James Patterson novels as I shelved them at the library, thinking, "WHO GIVES A SHIT." I know it's probably not cool to say, but... J. Rowling, I suppose, if only because ~I don't get it~. Like. I read Harry Potter because it's a cultural phenom, and that's great, but the way I see it, the dedication just ain't there pour moi. I suppose that the definition of "over-rated"? I don't know. (NOT A VALUE JUDGMENT)
27) What are you reading right now?
Lord. What aren't I reading? I'm in my multiple book reading phase, which I suppose is great, because my other phase is "well only reread Anna Karenina and/or Moveable Feast.
1. As I mentioned before: Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Fall of Prussia. My mother was like, "wtf why are you reading about PRUSSIA?!" and I was all "why NOT?" I don't know shit about Prussia, you guys, except that it's not a country anymore. And apparently while the French were revolutionizing and the English were debating types of monarchy, the towns/countries/establishments of Eastern Europe were still trying to decide if they wanted to be actual nations or feudal territories. Whatever. I think it's great. I'm up to 1800. It's almost like reading Greek histories.
2. Maps & Legends by Michael Chabon - short stories about "reading and writing along the borderlines." I bought it up because I started reading "Fan Fictions: On Sherlock Holmes" in the middle of Barnes & Noble and could not put it down. Whatever, I am Chabon fangirl. I WILL NOT LIE.
3. I'm rereading the Caroline Kennedy Bill of Rights book in an effort to convince myself that I'm making the right decision. lol, yes I am.
1) What author do you own the most books by?
Hemingway. (No surprise there.) It doesn't help that I took a class in college that was almost 50% Hemingway, though.
2) What book do you own the most copies of?
Rather intriguingly, I have four copies of Aeschylus' Oresteia. I bought one originally for a Greek Civ class, then when I took a second Greek history class, I bought it again (forgetting that I had purchased it in the first place). Then for an English paper, I bought a THIRD TRANSLATION so I could compare language in "The Eumenides." Finally, during senior year, I bought this little pocket version with the Greek text on the opposite page so I could keep my Greek skills in shape. (Yeah, not so much.)
For the record, my personal preference is the Lattimore translation. BUT THAT'S JUST OBVIOUS.
3) What fictional character are you secretly in love with?
Lady Brett Ashley from The Sun Also Rises. I know, it's sort of weird.
4) What book have you read more than any other?
It's a tie, between Anna Karenina and A Moveable Feast. I think technically I've opened A Moveable Feast more, because it can be read like a collection of short stories once you're comfortable in it and sometimes I only want some of it, like the parts about Gertrude Stein or even his lessons on how to be a writer. But cover to cover, I've read Anna Karenina four times - which not actually that impressive, except that book is massive.
5) What was your favorite book when you were 10-years-old?
And Then There Were None, or Ten Little Indians, or whatever you want to call it. I was through a serious, serious Agatha Christie phase in my youth. IT PROBABLY EXPLAINS THE LAW & ORDER, come to think of it.
6) What is the worst book you've read in the past year?
I tried desperately to get into Saturday by Ian McEwan, but failed miserably. Even though I understand how it relates to McEwan's canon - in that he keeps writing novels that span smaller and smaller spans of time - I couldn't help but see it as a lame Mrs. Dalloway homage. It made me feel jaded :(
7) What is the best book you've read in the past year?
As I mentioned to glassbomb in her post - Brief & Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao, oh my goodness. I picked it up for vaguely vain reasons - it won the Pulitzer, the author graduated from my college and set the book there, yet I had yet to read it, and therefore felt guilty. But the narrative style hits my sweet spot just so, and the way it's as much about Oscar as the people who lived to bring him to this miserable place he ended up, emotionally (part and parcel of the immigrant experience, I'd imagine) - ugh. LOVE IT. That, and scifi references, and footnotes. What's not to love?
8) If you could tell everyone you know to read one book, what would it be?
I'm going to make the controversial choice and say: Beloved. Sweet Jesus, yes. If only because it always surprises me, the people who end up loving it versus the ones who downright detest it.
9) What is the most difficult book you've ever read?
I'm pretty sure the answer to this question is once and future Ulysses, and since I gave up on it once, I can't answer. So - um. Lord of the Rings? Because it was required reading, all three of them, and I wanted to shoot myself the entire time because I really don't like fantasy as a genre at all? So, um. Yeah?
10) Do you prefer the French or the Russians?
THE FRENCH ARE SO BORING. RUSSIANS ALL THE WAY. Have we ever discussed me whole "damn you, Ronald Reagan, I could have majored in Russian studies and had a job if it wasn't for you" thing? Because it's so true.
11) Shakespeare, Milton or Chaucer?
I have to say Shakespeare, just because Paradise Lost and Canterbury Tales are my only exposure to Milton & Chaucer, whereas I've read... uh, everything but like two plays by Shakespeare? In true English major fashion. And whatever
12) Austen or Eliot?
I would say either, considering that nineteenth century British fiction is generally just not my thing, but I suppose Austen. I had to phsyically coerced by a professor to finish "Mill on the Floss." (Seriously, 19th Century British Fiction was a death of a class for me, which was sad, because the prof was pretty rad unto himself.
13) What is the biggest or most embarrassing gap in your reading?
I... have... never read Nabokov. No, not Lolita. I've never read a drop of Nabokov, period. I KNOW. I KNOW. I KNOW.
14) What is your favorite novel?
True story? Solaris by Stanislaw Lem. I will talk about this novel until I die. If I suddenly trip in the street and fall into a successful career as a writer, I will point to this novel as my raison d'etre. Basically - it's about what happens when you encounter the unknowable, the unquantifiable, the truly New Thing. Lem spends ENTIRE PAGES creating this fake history of the scientific study of this new alien planet, and all it goes to show is that we are limited by our pre-existing knowledge, our gestalts, when we analyze something. THE POINT OF THE ENTIRE NOVEL IS THAT YOU WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO FIND A WORD TO DESCRIBE THE SEA PLANET, BECAUSE IT DOESN'T EXIST. I think that's a really rad thing for a book of words to say. (And, the fact that on top of that you're reading it in translation and therefore not understanding its true it-ness re: nuisances of language? lol to the extreme)
It amuses me greatly that they twice adapted it to movie-form, since if you understand the text, that sort of invalidates the entire point of the story.
(Runner up: The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett. Oh, my god, I had such a Hammett thing in high school. OH MY GOD.)
15) Play?
OKAY. OKAY. Okay.
The easy answer is my thesis topic - anything by Oskar Kokoschka, specifically "Murderer, Hope of Women." I adore that man. He fell in love with Gustav Mahler's widow, and it was epic, and it was tragic, and it fucked him up so bad you wouldn't even believe. We spends whole plays killing her because he's so angry (in which she is always represented a female spirit sucking the spirit of the artist main character; I would like to point out, you know, NOT POINTING FINGERS, but she strung him along for a good long while. As in, um, getting pregnant, telling him to finish a painting before they could get married, and then, uh, having an abortion anyway).
BUT. My real answer is - wait for it - Ghost Sonata by Strindberg. It's just so-- it's fucked up to all extremes. It's almost as if it's this collection of macabre, creepy, wtf scenes - ladies who turn into mummies, cooks who seep the life out of their upper crust employers via soup; the fucked up, uncommunicative family. I LOVE IT. SO MUCH. I'm so weird.
(Yes. Yes. I have a severe thing for European modernism/post-modernism.)
16) Poem?
Unpossible. The whole of the Little Giddings quartets by Eliot, I suppose, with emphasis on the 4th one. What we call the beginning is often the end / And to make an end is to make a beginning. / The end is where we start from. Oh, oh, oh it stirs my heart.
(Runner up: "Valediction Forbidding Mourning" by Donne. There is something so insanely lovely about love described as two souls moving like opposite points of a fixed compass, parted by never separate. PERHAPS THAT'S WHY IT'S MY AIM NAME.)
17) Essay?
This is totally lame and maybe doesn't even count - An Indecent Proposal. WHATEVER. I THINK IT'S HYSTERICAL.
18) Short story?
I am woefully inadequate in this department. Murder in the Rue Morgue, I'd imagine, just because a) again, proto-Law & Order obsession, you make so much SENSE now; b) I can't believe I never saw a single Poe joke the entire time that ape-eats-a-lady's-face thing was going down. (Or maybe I did, and just missed it.)
19) Non-fiction?
In Our Defense: The Bill of Rights in Action, by Caroline Kennedy and some other person I can't remember. Uh, reading this made me realize I wanted to be a lawyer (it's the bill of rights broken down by part, and an on-point legal case that illustrates its strength, weakness, and new interpretations). It's from the early 90s, but still hella good.
(Runner up: THE BIO OF MARIE ANTOINETTE THAT THE SOPHIA COPPOLA MOVIE IS BASED ON. I have no shame.)
20) Graphic novel?
Yeah, I don't do those. Sorry.
21) Memoir?
An Unfinished Woman by Lillian Hellman. See? I TOTALLY HAD A DASHIELL HAMMETT THING GOING ON.
22) History?
*breathes* Probably the Mary Queen of Scots bio I read last year (by Antonia Fraser, of Marie Antoinette fame)? Although this book on Prussia I'm reading right now is FUCKING FASCINATING AS HELL. Partially because sometimes you forget that that Eastern Europe was essentially like a both of Greek city-states well into the industrial age.
23) Mystery or noir?
Like I mentioned above: THE MALTESE FALCON BY DASHIELL MOTHERFUCKING HAMMETT. True story: "Dashiell" is on my baby name list.
24) Science fiction?
Since I already answered Solaris above, I'll go with Le Guin, Left Hand of Darkness.
25) Who is your favorite writer?
I think I have to answer Hemingway. I just love the bastard. I know that's cliche, but who gives a shit.
26) Who is the most overrated writer alive today?
Unfortunately, I can't answer. I have largely apathy for most popular writers - I used to thumb through James Patterson novels as I shelved them at the library, thinking, "WHO GIVES A SHIT." I know it's probably not cool to say, but... J. Rowling, I suppose, if only because ~I don't get it~. Like. I read Harry Potter because it's a cultural phenom, and that's great, but the way I see it, the dedication just ain't there pour moi. I suppose that the definition of "over-rated"? I don't know. (NOT A VALUE JUDGMENT)
27) What are you reading right now?
Lord. What aren't I reading? I'm in my multiple book reading phase, which I suppose is great, because my other phase is "well only reread Anna Karenina and/or Moveable Feast.
1. As I mentioned before: Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Fall of Prussia. My mother was like, "wtf why are you reading about PRUSSIA?!" and I was all "why NOT?" I don't know shit about Prussia, you guys, except that it's not a country anymore. And apparently while the French were revolutionizing and the English were debating types of monarchy, the towns/countries/establishments of Eastern Europe were still trying to decide if they wanted to be actual nations or feudal territories. Whatever. I think it's great. I'm up to 1800. It's almost like reading Greek histories.
2. Maps & Legends by Michael Chabon - short stories about "reading and writing along the borderlines." I bought it up because I started reading "Fan Fictions: On Sherlock Holmes" in the middle of Barnes & Noble and could not put it down. Whatever, I am Chabon fangirl. I WILL NOT LIE.
3. I'm rereading the Caroline Kennedy Bill of Rights book in an effort to convince myself that I'm making the right decision. lol, yes I am.